---
title: Concepts
description: The twelve core terms that unlock every screen, doc, and package name in AKOS.
---

AKOS is built around a small vocabulary. Learn these twelve words and every screen, doc, and package name starts to make sense. Each term links to its dedicated page for deeper coverage.

## The big picture

A person owns a process. AKOS turns that process into a **flow**. The flow drives **agents**. Agents use **tools**. Tools touch real systems. Everything in the middle is governed — identity, permissions, sandbox, egress allowlist, cost tracking, signed audit ledger.

```
Operator → Flow → Agents → Tools → Systems
              ↕
          Governance
```

## Twelve-term glossary

| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| **Agent** | An AI worker — a model + instructions + tools that performs one task. |
| **Tool** | A capability an agent can call: search, HTTP request, file IO, run code. |
| **Flow** | A graph of nodes — agents, tools, conditions, gates — wired together as a DAG. |
| **Node** | One step in a flow. 14+ kinds exist (agent, condition, parallel, human gate, RAG, output, and more). |
| **Process** | A flow of flows: ordered phases, each phase's output feeding the next via JSONPath mapping. |
| **Run** | One execution of a flow or process — traced, costed, and audited from start to finish. |
| **Trigger** | An event that starts a flow: a schedule, a webhook, a file change, a SaaS event, and more. |
| **HITL gate** | A human-in-the-loop pause — the run waits for a person to approve before proceeding. |
| **Vertical** | An industry preset (finance, legal, healthcare, …) — product name, theme, terminology, role defaults, and security posture, all in config data, no new code. |
| **Sidecar** | The background process that actually executes agents, isolated from the UI. Same typed protocol whether running locally, in a browser shell, or in a Kubernetes pod. |
| **RAG** | Retrieval-Augmented Generation — grounding an agent in your real documents and data via a built-in chunker, embedder, vector store, and reranker pipeline. |
| **Artifact** | A saved output of a run — the result, kept and inspectable after the run completes. |

## Where to go next

- **[Why AKOS](./philosophy)** — works in any industry, builds on what you already have, brings your automations with you.
- **[Agents](./agents)** — model, instructions, tools, context, and governed identity in detail.
- **[Flows](./flows)** — DAG structure, node kinds, authoring modes (GUI / YAML / code).
- **[Processes](./pipelines)** — multi-phase flows with data handoff and approval gates.
- **[Triggers](./triggers)** — all 14 GA trigger kinds and OAuth-once auto-registration.
- **[Architecture](./architecture)** — the two-layer split between AgentsKit upstream and the AKOS operating layer, plus the maintained package map.

For the run lifecycle — how a single execution moves from trigger to audit ledger — see **[Run lifecycle](/docs/how-it-works/run-lifecycle)**.

For screen-by-screen product guidance (nav rail, section rails, and operator workflows), start at **[Using the App](/docs/using-the-app)**.